This invention relates generally to supply chain management and, more particularly, relates to a system for providing integrated supply chain management using networked computer systems.
In the global economy of today, supply chains are commonly used to deliver goods reliably and at affordable prices. A supply chain typically involves the flow of material, information, and money between customers, suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and, possibly, financial institutions. Material flow includes, among other things, the physical product flows from suppliers to customers through the chain and reverse flows via product returns, servicing, recycling, and disposal. Information flow involves order transmission, order confirmation, and delivery status. Monetary or financial flow includes credit terms, payment schedules, payments, and consignment and title ownership arrangements. These flows cut across multiple functions and areas both within an organization and across organizations. In this regard, supply chains exist in service, retail, and manufacturing organizations, although the complexity of the supply chain may vary greatly from industry to industry and organization to organization. The coordination and integration of the material, information and financial flows within and across organizations is critical to effective supply chain management. Thus, in order for the supply chain to work for its intended purpose, all organizations involved in the supply chain must coordinate their activities with one another so that efficiency throughout the supply chain is achieved.
To coordinate activities within a supply chain, Manufacturing Resource Planning (“MRP”) and Enterprise Resource Planning (“ERP”) tools have been employed by organizations in an effort to gain control of the flows, plant operations, and to provide management with timely and useful reporting. Some companies use explicit supply chain management (“SCM”) and supply chain execution (“SCE”) systems which are often focused on a specific functional requirement. Generally, MRP systems have been used to translate the schedule for the production of products into time-phased net requirements for the sub-assemblies, components and raw materials, planning and procurement. ERP systems address the technology aspects of MRP such as client/server distributed architecture, RDBMS, object oriented programming etc.
In addition to MRP, ERP, SCM/SCE systems, a further supply chain management tool is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,157,915 which relates to an active collaboration technology in an open architectural framework that is used to deliver information and decision support tools to various organizations. In the framework described in the '915 patent, the people across the organizations collaborate through domain task and specific active documents. The active documents contain both the necessary business information and decision support tools. Dynamic decision making is thus made possible through the delivery of active documents to appropriate parties in response to events that are triggered by business processes, the organizations themselves, or other applications. In this manner, the active documents allow organizations to exchange information, use decision tools to act on the shared information, respond to dynamic events that require decision making, and engage the proper role players in accordance with the business process.
The method and means described in the '915 patent provide the most value in a manufacturing supply chain where people from all the supply chain partners collaborate to create the production and distribution plans (called “business scenarios”). The '915 patent focuses on user access security, workflow routing of the “active documents” (i.e., Lotus Notes documents) and the inclusion in those documents of links to data warehouse information sources and decision support tools which the users can utilize in defining, analyzing, modifying, and approving the business scenarios. While generally response to the needs of the supply chain partners, the system and method described in the '915 does suffer, among other disadvantages, the disadvantage of requiring human involvement in the analysis, planning, and approval stages.